by Anne Griffin
Oh, he was good. It was like he’d been waiting for that moment for years. I couldn’t help but smile. But it was you who shook his hand and drew him away. As I stood there looking over at the pair of you, I noticed his ill-fitting suit and the sunken cheeks. When I’d first met him he was a young man, handsome and strong, but now he wore more than signs of age. He held his hollow body, like it might cave in if someone were to grab his shoulders and push down. Cancer, not that I knew it then. He died three months later.
‘The wedding! What about the wedding, Maurice?’ Your mother shrieked at me the day she heard the news of Jason’s passing. ‘They’ll still go ahead with it. I mean Hilary will still keep the hotel going won’t she?’
‘Might we let the man rest first, Sadie? Give his wife a chance, before you start badgering her.’
‘Thank you, Maurice. Thank you for pointing that out to me because I was just about to march up there to ask her about it. What kind of woman do you take me for, Maurice Hannigan?’
When my full name was used, I knew to shut up.
‘I’ll ring Kevin. What time is it over there? I can never figure this out. Maurice? Maurice, what time is it over in the States?’
There was a deluge of calls back and forth. All sorts of scenarios were discussed between the pair of you from the hotel closing down permanently, to, the Lord preserve us, marquees – in our garden no less. I fairly shifted in my chair at that one. But after three weeks of speculation and worry and a massive phone bill, it all died down. The hotel went on as normal, much to my despair.
‘Maurice, do you not care about your only child’s wedding? It’s like as if you wouldn’t mind if the whole hotel went up in smoke.’
‘If only dreams could come true, Sadie.’ A clever man would not have said that. Instead, he would have protested at such an injustice being levelled, proclaiming his unquestioning support for his son’s wishes.
‘You and your stupid feuds. You’re a petty little man, who can’t see what he has in front of him. Your son, our beautiful boy, is getting married and wants to do so in that hotel and all you can think about is how mean they were to you when you worked for them. Well get over it. Bosses aren’t meant to be nice. But you know who is supposed to be? A father. Yes, loving and kind, apparently. You’re doing a grand job of that one now, aren’t you?’
She rose from the chair, threw her knitting on the sofa, walked past me, slamming the sitting-room door. There was no dinner, or tea, or supper to be had in our house for seven long days thereafter. No stews, no scones, no freshly baked soda bread, although I did arrive home one day as its aroma wafted through the air. But as I could find no evidence of its existence I assumed my longing was playing tricks on me. As it turned out, however, while I ate shop-bought bread and butter sandwiches on the sofa, she enjoyed the soda bread in our bedroom. For it was there she was holed up in protest. Door locked and radio on. I slept in your room. How she had survived without the telly I’ve no idea. Although, I suspect, her being a dab hand with the VCR, she was taping everything in the evening and watching it during the day when I left. A clever woman. A woman in whose hands a grudge was respected and played out to its fullest potential. On day seven, I waved the white flag.
It had taken me the full week to think of something that would end the war. I ruminated on it in great detail, thinking through the pros and cons of each option with both Tony and Molly. Flowers and Dairy Milk chocolate wouldn’t cut it this time. But after a glass of whiskey at Hartigan’s, we had it. I slipped the envelope under our bedroom door, leaving a corner sticking out on my side so I’d see when she picked it up. And when I saw it disappear, I left her to it and went to my refuge on the sofa. She was down in less than a minute. Sat beside me and laid her head on my shoulder. We didn’t say anything for a while, but our hands found each other. In silence, we looked across at the family photo of the three of us over the fireplace, soon to be replaced, I had already been told, once Rosaleen said ‘I do.’
‘You’re a good father.’
‘There’s always room for improvement,’ I answered, relieved at my reprieve.
‘Have you told them yet?’
‘Sure, didn’t I ring them Thursday. It’s all arranged. They’ll be home in three weeks for a weekend treat in the hotel. It’s all paid for.’
‘And you arranged all that yourself?’
‘I’m a grown man, Sadie.’
‘I know, but that can’t have been easy, going in there on your own and all.’
‘Sure, I was fine. It took me all of five minutes to arrange the rooms.’
‘The rooms? Maurice, you do know they’re living together over there.’
‘They can do what they like over there. But over here they’ll have two rooms for three nights.’
There was of course a small lie in what I’d told her: it had bothered me, and bothered me greatly to walk into that place, voluntarily. But my desperation gave me the incentive to stand at that reception desk to arrange a weekend visit home for the pair of you. As the girl approached me from the rear office, I had to brace myself.
There she was – my Molly – or at least how I’d always imagined her, all confidence and smiles but with a lovely air of modesty dancing around the edges. I swallowed hard as my hands held on to the reception counter and I came to my senses. You see, despite it all, I could see them in her.
‘Well, you have to be a Dollard,’ I said, when I finally found my voice.
‘No, I’m a Bruton. I’m Emily Bruton. My grandmother was a Dollard though, Rachel Dollard.’ No more than twenty at that point, she had the most beautiful of smiles. Her voice was sweet and light, innocent almost.
‘So you’re Jason’s daughter?’
‘Yes, that’s right: Jason and Hilary.’
‘I liked your father.’
‘He was a very good man…’ She nodded and looked down at her hands, smiling as if a particular pleasant memory had come to mind. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know your name. I’m only just getting to know everyone. Having been away at boarding school and university means I’ve lost touch a bit. And now, well, because of Daddy, I’ve come home to help.’
She looked at me with her kind brown eyes. I smiled back knowing this would all change once she heard my reply.
‘Hannigan. Your neighbour.’
I paused, to let the news sink in.
‘Ah. Mr Hannigan.’
As quick as you like, her bright eyes dulled with the mistrust and dislike of the man who’d bought up their land. ‘Well, I see,’ she said pushing her hair behind her ear, coughing, buying more time, ‘how can I help?’
At first I thought I was going a bit mad, thinking she was like Molly. But over the months when I got to know her more, the feeling didn’t change. In fact if anything, it got stronger. It was her character. Her graciousness, her courageousness with life. Thrown as she was into this place. Her life choices taken from her so young. There she was, her father having died, left with a broken-hearted mother and a hotel to run. Hilary, the mother, hadn’t an ounce of interest in it, Emily told me later. Had been dead set against it becoming a hotel in the first place. In fact when she’d first met Jason in Dublin, in his family-owned hotel, she thought she’d found her way out. A way to be rid of the crumbling house. Rachel and Reggie, her parents, seemed to hate it as much as her.
‘If that’s what he wants, Hilary, let him have it,’ Rachel had told her daughter when she’d first heard of Jason’s plan. ‘Frankly, I don’t care what he does, I just want heat. For once in my lifetime in this blasted place, I would like to feel warm. If he can manage that then he can build a bloody zoo.’
Emily’s legacy – the Rainsford House Hotel.
Had she lived, Molly that is, I believe she would have lived her life, like Emily, always righting things and sorting things with that same selflessness. I feel she’d have taken her father in hand. I might be a different man altogether.
‘I’m not the ogre they make me out to be, you know,�
� I said, that first day as I stood across from Emily. She lowered her head to the computer to make the booking for your stay.
‘I didn’t say you were.’
‘You didn’t have to,’ I paused, searching her face, wondering if she might let me in at all. It was an odd sensation, this worrying about what others thought of me. ‘It was all just business you know, buying the land. Nothing personal.’ I coughed then and felt myself floundering around like some fish washed up on a beach. But somehow I got myself together and said this: ‘It can’t be easy with your father gone.’
She stopped what she was doing and looked at me for what seemed like ages, like she was trying to figure me out. She said nothing. I was a bit stumped as to where to go from there. It was then I noticed her tears. She leaned her elbows on the desk and sobbed. Funny isn’t it, what you remember in those moments of panic. It was the sound of jingling coins. I must have had my hands in my pockets foostering with my money, while I stood looking at her like a mute gom.
‘Ah, here,’ I might’ve managed. Or maybe I stretched out my hand on the counter to attempt some kind of useless comfort. ‘Wait there,’ I do remember saying after a bit, when things weren’t looking like they were getting any better, ‘I’ll be back.’
I went off to the bar, returning with two Bushmills only to find her missing. Bold as you like, I went around the counter and knocked on the office door. Not waiting for a reply, I opened it to find her with her head still in her hands at a desk.
‘Drink this,’ I said, as I placed the whiskey beside her. ‘It’ll steady you.’
She looked at it, then me. Finally taking it from my outstretched hand, she smelt it before taking some and grimacing.
‘Takes a bit of getting used to alright,’ I said, having a healthy mouthful of my own.
‘They hate you, Mr Hannigan,’ she said, after swallowing her second mouthful. ‘You paid them far too little for far too much. That’s what they’ve always told me.’
‘They’re not wrong. I’m a businessman. I’ll not apologise for that.’
Surprisingly, she gave the briefest of smiles. She was more composed now, sitting back in her seat. She gestured to a chair opposite her at the other side of the desk. I took it and sat as she tapped her fingernails at her glass, watching the liquid shiver under the impact.
‘It killed him. This place, this bloody dream of his. It killed my father,’ she continued, not looking at me but at the whiskey before tipping it back, shuddering and laying the empty glass on the desk before her. ‘We are in debt up to our necks,’ she added, speaking to the empty tumbler. ‘And my mother, well, what can I say … she’s heartbroken and totally out of it. She can’t face the mess. Losing money hand over fist in a hotel that no one will want to buy.’
‘You’re trying to sell?’
‘Oh, it’s not on the market. Not yet anyway. That’s what I’m here for. To try to figure it all out. Mother’s drugged up to the eyeballs. So it’s just me. It’s all up to me.’
She looked about her, surveying her empire. ‘And look at the fine job I’m doing,’ she laughed, as her hand gestured enthusiastically in my direction, while those big clear eyes of hers came to rest on mine, ‘confessing all to the enemy. Does that make you happy, Mr Hannigan?’ she asked, leaning into the desk, towards me. ‘To know that we are at last about to fall.’
What more had I expected from her? To be forgiven for what I’d done to them. For the satisfaction I had felt as each piece of land they lost became mine. For checking the land registry in the county council every year or so to see my name as owner of what once was theirs. Did I expect this young girl, who I imagined as my own not ten minutes ago, to say none of that mattered? That her father’s death could not be laid at my door. I sat there, my whiskey not yet gone, letting the silence, save for the hum of the computer sitting on her desk, fill the room. I swirled the last of the liquid in the glass, and watched it catch at the sides and fall to the bottom, before swirling it again and again and again, like a child with a spinning top, mesmerised by its simplicity. And when at last the time came to either leave, without your surprise holiday, or bite the bullet and reply, I looked at her, took the last of my whiskey and said:
‘I worked here once, you know.’
‘Yes, mother mentioned it.’
‘It wasn’t a particularly nice place. Your great-grandfather Hugh was not an easy man. And as for your great-uncle Thomas … Let’s just say those men knew how to throw a punch. This here, see this,’ I pointed to my scar, ‘that was him.’
‘Oh God.’ Her brief glance and wince at my face was enough to lower her head and to give a sigh that felt more hopeless than any of her words gone before. She raised her fist to her mouth and looked off to a future, I imagined, she neither wanted nor asked for. I saw the tears well and glisten again. It was then that I felt regret for drawing her in on a history that was not really hers, to suggest a blame she had no power over.
‘How much do you need?’ I asked. It took her by surprise as much as it did me. But there it was.
‘How much do I need, for what?’ she asked, slumping back into her chair, wiping at her eyes.
‘To keep this place going. You said you wanted to sell it. How much not to?’
And that’s how it began, my foray into the hotel trade. As simple as that. Robert, the solicitor, was killed trying to get me to reconsider.
‘Are you mad, Maurice? No one’s investing in hotels. Not round these parts anyway. Stick to the machines man.’ But he never turned me.
‘Do it,’ I told him, my fist landing on his desk, frightening the bejesus out of the both of us. Never challenged me again.
Emily, Robert and I have kept the secret of it. Sadie, you and Hilary have never known a thing. But Molly, Molly knew. I told her. I met her not long after the papers were signed. Off out on one of my walks through the fields. She came up alongside me, then ran past me. I’d say she was twelve, nothing more. That is one of the things about her visits, I never know what age she might be. I told her as she twirled about me, her eyes closed, spinning and spinning, laughing with the dizziness. I thought she’d not heard me. But before she left, whirling off into her nothingness again, she smiled and gave me a thumbs up. It was good enough for me.
I hold a forty-nine per cent share of this place. Forty-nine per cent of this stool with a hundred per cent of my arse sitting on it. Forty-nine per cent for this scar on my face, for a robbed childhood and Thomas Dollard, an enemy for life. What would you all have thought the night of the wedding, had you known when we danced on its floors and ate its food and you, the happy couple, slept in its bed, that it was mine. It was my dark, shameful secret. It was nothing to be proud of. Nothing to boast about. Nothing I wanted the world to know. I have stayed away from it, not wanting to be reminded. That’s what me and Emily agreed. I left her to it. The exemplary silent partner.
Emily has steered the place through. Even when the recession hit six years back, she managed to hold her steady. Robert has acted as my agent, allowing me my freedom to remain outside of it. Never allowing it to pull me into its lair.
But as much as my decision has weighed heavily on me over the years, I’ve always felt it has been far worse for Emily. After all, the only person with the potential to be offended on my side was me, and I seemed to be managing it, to an extent. But for Emily, well, that was a different kettle of fish. Surely for her it was a matter of betrayal. Did she feel her father turn in his grave the day she shook my hand? We never really talked about it after. Somehow it felt sordid. This place we found ourselves in was something that perhaps should never have happened had human weakness not stepped in our way. Over the years that followed we kept ourselves to ourselves, just as with our secret. All this time, never speaking about it again, until the day Robert came looking for me.
* * *
It was in 2006. Ireland was in the height of the boom. Money was coming out our ears, or so they told us. Personally, I couldn’t have complained. My f
amily was comfortable, more than, in fact. You and Rosaleen had Adam with Caitríona on the way. Your mother and me in our twilight years, working out as well as we might have hoped. So when Robert came waylaying me about the hotel, I didn’t want to know a thing about it.
He’d tracked me down to a farm in Balnaboy where Francie was harvesting a few acres. I’d gone along to check all was going well. Best always to keep an eye. No matter how good your lads are, the odd spot check doesn’t do any harm. I’d finished having the chat with Francie and was heading back to the Jeep at the far end of the field when I saw Robert’s Range Rover pull up. I watched him get out and walk over to my Jeep and lean his back against my driver door. He waved. I didn’t bother to reply.
‘Well,’ I said on arriving within earshot.
‘Maurice. How’s she faring?’
I came up along beside him and stood at my rear door. We remained that way for a bit, looking out on the cut rows. Like a badly shaved head, they were. Tufts sticking up everywhere. But the gold being poured into those trailers at the top of the field was a sight to behold. The yield was great that day. When I saw them fill, grains rushing down the funnel like some powerful waterfall, my heart fluttered a little. Not that it was my own grain. But still, the sight of a yield such as that always gave me a thrill. Robert pulled at a forlorn stalk and started to shred what was left of it. I watched him take it apart until only flakes remained and fell from his hand into the wheel tracks below.
‘Emily was over with me. She was wondering would you call to see her tonight.’
I looked at him, then out at the fields.
‘No,’ I said.
‘An hour. That’s all she wants.’
I watched Francie turn the harvester to begin on another row of oats. Inch by inch the crop was swallowed up. When he was a quarter of the way up the line, I’d had my fill of Robert waiting for me to change my mind and decided it was time to move on. I stood in front of him.
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘that’s your job to talk business with her. That’s what I pay you for.’